IDCC: Influence-Driven Content Cache for NFC in IoE

The Internet of Everything (IoE) has recently become a hot topic. With the development of Internet of Things (IoT) technology, people can connect to networks in increasingly diverse ways. The surge in users, devices, and requests poses significant challenges to network capacity and backhaul links. Content caching technology has long been considered a promising approach to improving network performance. However, existing methods still have room for improvement in terms of content transmission efficiency and user access latency. To address these issues, this article proposes an influence-driven content caching (IDCC) method. Specifically, based on a caching strategy of “caching content that is likely to have the greatest future influence on the most influential edge devices,” this article designs a comprehensive framework encompassing content selection, updating, and placement to optimize content caching efficiency, enhance network spectral efficiency, and improve user’s Quality of Experience (QoE). First, a content selection strategy based on the popularity dynamics prediction method is developed by utilizing graph neural networks and contrastive learning to model heterogeneous data. Second, a content update mechanism for cached content and key caching information is designed based on the popularity of content and near-field communications (NFCs) between users. Furthermore, interconnected network devices are represented as a graph, and the communication influence of key network nodes is predicted using autoencoders and graph neural networks to identify the optimal caching nodes for maximizing benefits. Finally, extensive experiments show that the proposed IDCC method offers significant advantages in reducing network latency and improving network utilization.